On Monday afternoon, the F.B.I. office in Newark posted one of the most bizarre official statements I’ve ever read. It warned the public “against pointing lasers at manned aircraft” or attempting to shoot down suspected drones.
The reason for the post was obvious — hysteria over alleged drone sightings in New Jersey was leading people to take matters into their own hands, including by shining lasers into the eyes of pilots. And now the F.B.I. was worried that the public response could escalate even to the point of citizens grabbing guns from their homes to address a perceived aerial threat.
But was the aerial threat even real? It’s possible that the United States government or even foreign actors could be flying drones in a way that should trigger public suspicion, but it’s also becoming quite clear that an immense percentage of the so-called drone sightings in New Jersey and elsewhere are actually commercial and private aircraft, or even stars and planets.
The drone story is just one in a seemingly endless parade of false or misleading narratives that inflame public anger and deepen American division. For example, we just watched a number — a huge number — of Americans actually revel in the coldblooded killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. Their celebrations were driven not just by a broken moral compass, but also by a fundamental misunderstanding of the medical system that places far too much blame on insurance companies for Americans’ frustrations with the system as a whole.
The list goes on. In November, KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation) reported that more families are refusing childhood vaccines — another dangerous development that’s rooted in fabrications and falsehoods. Time and again, rumors are perceived as fact, and the social fabric tears a little more.
Not all the stories are equally important. Given the low likelihood of average citizens actually shooting down an airplane, the December drone panic is probably going to go down as a quirky artifact of history — far less consequential than vigilante violence or vaccine refusal. But it is a vivid example of exactly how the new media ecosystem works.
Why are we so frequently leaping from legitimate concerns — from healthy vigilance — to outrageous excess?
To better understand the collapse of trust of traditional American institutions and the rise of alternative voices, it’s necessary to distinguish between earned distrust and manufactured distrust. An institution earns a degree of distrust when it makes mistakes. When a news organization gets a story wrong — even if it’s promptly corrected — it tells consumers that it’s fallible. When public health authorities provide poor guidance, it breeds public suspicion.
There’s a cultural factor as well. Many Americans feel alienated from elite institutions. They don’t feel that their perspectives are heard or well represented in the American establishment, so they look elsewhere for information and understanding.
Manufactured distrust is different. That’s when new media amplifies, exaggerates or even fabricates the failings of the establishment. Those who traffic in manufactured distrust exploit earned distrust. They use the confusion caused by ordinary failings to create a sense of extraordinary crisis, but their argument isn’t “trust no one”; it’s “trust me.” And often they’re not worthy of your trust.
I know there is nothing new about establishment failures and bad actors contributing to confusion. American history is replete with examples of public hysteria and wild conspiracy theories.
I’m old enough to remember the satanic panic of the 1980s, when a remarkable number of people believed that there was widespread ritual abuse of children in American day care. The Spanish-American War began in part because newspapers pushed unproven speculation that Spain had blown up the battleship Maine while it lay at anchor in Havana. The Texas declaration of secession in 1861 contains the remarkable claim that abolitionists had distributed poison to enslaved Texans to use to “bring blood and carnage to our firesides.”
It’s hard, however, to avoid the conclusion that the pace of public hysteria has accelerated, often to the point where it seems that a substantial portion of our national conversation is dedicated to debunking disinformation.
Let’s turn back to the drone panic to see the process at work. First, we can see the earned distrust, the failure of institutions to do their job effectively. Politicians helped spread disinformation, including people who are otherwise credible.
Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, shared a video of “drones” that turned out to include stars in the constellation Orion. An ABC affiliate in New York zoomed in on a possible drone in New Jersey that a number of observers immediately identified as the planet Venus. Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey posted a thread on X describing his own experience watching drones and then, the next day, posted, “After more analysis and help from civilian pilots/experts and flight data, I’ve concluded the possible drone sightings pointed out to me were almost certainly planes.”
These are seemingly good-faith mistakes (or perhaps politicians trying on populist clothes) but even good-faith mistakes can damage trust and contribute to the sense that the authorities are either dishonest or incompetent.
That’s where manufactured distrust comes into play. In the online world, there is rarely any such thing as a good-faith mistake. Instead, the message from alternative media is relentless — “They” hate you. “They” are lying to you. “They” have an agenda. This is one reason it’s so hard to fact-check conspiracies. The rebuttals are often coming from the same institutions that so many Americans have been told to hate.
The sad reality is that many of these alternative media sources are often maliciously dishonest or — even if they are acting in good faith — don’t show the slightest regard for basic journalistic principles.
The New Jersey drone story took a particularly ominous turn when Joe Rogan, arguably the king of alternative media, shared a video on X that he said was the “first video about these drones that has got me genuinely concerned.” Rogan’s post has 22 million views. The video has more than 30 million views on X alone.
And if you watch it and take it at face value, you should be genuinely concerned. It features a man named John Ferguson, the chief executive of a drone manufacturer in Wichita, Kan. So automatically you’re interested. A drone manufacturer would seem to understand what’s happening in the skies more than the average bear, right?
Well, not necessarily. The core of the video is a claim that roughly 80 Soviet nuclear warheads went missing in Ukraine at the end of the Cold War and that an unidentified person had actually seen and touched the warhead (“he physically put his hands” on it, Ferguson said), and he knew it was heading to the United States. That person had supposedly tried to raise a warning at the highest levels of the American government.
Ferguson also argues that “everyone knows that the United States government, this administration, is pushing to get into a war with Russia.”
“If they are our drones,” he concludes, “the only reason why they would be flying, and flying that low, is because they’re trying to smell something on the ground. That’s it.” In other words, these drones might be looking for the radiation signature of a rogue nuclear weapon.
It’s one thing to misidentify Venus. It’s another thing entirely to create a nuclear alarm over random sightings of lights in the sky. A responsible public figure would not retweet that video — not without debunking it or providing substantial evidence to support it. Yet Rogan used his immense public platform to toss it into the public conversation.
Do Ferguson’s claims hold up? My friend Jim Geraghty, with whom I worked at National Review, published a thorough analysis of the video, and the problems begin immediately. As Geraghty writes, “There has never been any serious evidence of any lost or loose nuclear weapons during the transfer of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal to Russia.”
The idea that President Biden is spoiling for war with Russia is news to the Ukrainians. They’ve been begging America to increase the pace and scope of weapons deliveries, and they’ve begged Biden for permission to use American weapons on Russian soil. Biden deserves credit for supporting Ukraine, but American support has often been too small and too slow.
And who is this unnamed person who allegedly put his hands on a lost Soviet warhead? Can we speak to him?
Ferguson may be right about the utility of drones for sweeping in search of telltale signs of nuclear radiation, but he provided us with no reason to believe his story. In fact, there are many (obvious!) reasons to be skeptical. His premise is wrong. His source is unidentified.
And is this how the federal government would search for a rogue nuke? With a small number of drones flying at night? After all, as Geraghty points out, “The U.S. government has a Nuclear Emergency Support Team, and they roll out for any large event.”
It is possible that there are drones in the air searching for dangerous objects. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and while Ferguson’s video doesn’t lack extraordinary claims, it lacks evidence, much less extraordinary evidence.
In a famous speech he gave in 1838 to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Ill., Abraham Lincoln argued that our national demise “cannot come from abroad.” Our nation is too strong, too large, and too distant from the great powers to fall by conquest. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
He spoke those words before the Civil War — before even the violent prelude to the Civil War. During Lincoln’s lifetime, we did our best to commit national suicide through a great conflict over the most consequential moral issue in our nation’s history.
But I’m concerned now that we’re in danger of something quite different. We’re not dividing over profound questions of humanity, dignity and liberty but in large part as a result of a series of absurd disputes and bizarre beliefs. We’re not facing a single cataclysmic conflict, but rather a steady degradation of national confidence and solidarity.
As our deep distrust makes us more gullible, we’re harming ourselves slowly but surely, one poison post at a time.
